About

I started this blog in 2009. I had just graduated with a degree in Agriculture from Uppsala, Sweden, studying abroad from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a place I didn't even come back to for my graduation ceremony. Instead I headed to New York City, where I worked for an agricultural non-profit. I joined Meetup.com because I didn't really know very many people in the city. One of the groups I joined was the Eating Paleo in NYC Meetup.

I'd discovered the "paleo diet" many years before, when I was in college and struggling with health problems that seemed like they belonged to someone much much older. Asthma, GERD, IBS, constant colds and infections. I had tried vegetarian and vegan diets and they didn't do much good. My specialty in Agriculture was agricultural economics and I read quite a few economics blogs and one day on Marginal Revolution I read about an economist, Art De Vany, who did something called the "paleo diet." It made an impression on me despite my bias against eating animal products and the more I read about it from Jared Diamond, the book Stone Age Economics, anarcho-primitivists, and paleo bloggers, the more determined I was to live this way. I transitioned slowly to a low-carbohydrate "paleo diet" and most of my health issues resolved.

As I got better I loosened up the restrictions though and ate my share of cinnamon rolls in Sweden, though 80% of the time I ate fruits, vegetables, meat, and fish, with some dairy. The Meetup in NYC was the first place I encountered other people who ate this way. One of the people at the Meetup didn't eat this way, but wanted to write about us for a New York Times article. Around the time it came out, I thought it would be a good idea to start a blog. It would be a good place to reach out to people with questions about the article and it would also be an opportunity to practice my web development skills.

Through the article and the blog I became a minor figure in the Paleo diet movement and found myself invited to speak on podcasts and at a Paleo conference. I started eating a more strict paleo diet as I became convinced that non-paleo foods were not such sub-optimal, but probably damaging to my health.

But behind the scenes I was beginning to have doubts. I started studying anthropology at school and found much of the literature contradicted things paleo dieters viewed as the gospel truth. I also became very alarmed by how saturated the movement was becoming with people peddling junk-science. I had unfortunately started to suffer from new and alarming health issues such as very low blood pressure. I transitioned to a more liberal whole foods diet that included some grains like rice, which resolved many of my issues. My doubts weren't particularly well-received by the larger paleo community though and I decided that the larger movement was something I did not want to be associated with. But I continued to want to write about food and diets, so I've kept this blog.

This blog runs on Drupal and the theme is a customized version of Twitter Bootstrap.

Melissa McEwen

This blog is about the intersection between evolutionary biology and food. But also about practical applications, sustainable agriculture, and general tasty things.